A Man Without Breath

I told him about the bayonet and the pieces of broken scabbard found in the snow near the bodies of Ribe and Greiss.

‘So you think that was my scabbard probably?’ said Von Gersdorff.

‘Yes. I do.’

‘Christ.’

Then I told him about the stripper clip I’d found in Alok Dyakov’s pocket; and how Alok Dyakov was now my best suspect for the murders of Ribe and Greiss.

‘We’re going to have to be very careful how we proceed with this,’ he said.

‘We?’

‘Yes. You don’t think I’m going to let you do this alone, do you? Besides, I’d love to see the back of that Russian bastard.’

‘And Von Kluge?’

Von Gersdorff shook his head. ‘I don’t think you’ve got much chance of hurting him with this,’ he said. ‘Not without that tape.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I gave it to General von Tresckow,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘He judged it too dangerous to use and destroyed it.’

‘That’s a pity,’ I said, but I could hardly fault the general for thinking, as I had done, that a tape recording of the leader offering to buy the loyalty of one of his top field marshals with a substantial cheque was much too dangerous to keep.

‘You’ll remember that Von Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer were arrested. At the time we were more worried about the Gestapo than we were about Gunther von Kluge. And I’m afraid it will take a lot more than a tape recording of a compromising conversation to bring down Hitler.’

I nodded and handed him back his bayonet.

‘So what’s the next step?’ he asked. ‘I mean we are going after Dyakov, aren’t we?’

‘We need to speak to Lieutenant Voss,’ I said. ‘After all it was him who first encountered Alok Dyakov. The Russian told me his version of what happened on the road, much of which I’ve forgotten. I was distracted by the arrival of the members of the international commission when he told me. We need the whole story from Voss, I think.’

*

Before I went to bed I returned the envelope containing his belongings to Dyakov. His light was on in his hut, and so I was obliged to knock on his door and give him a story which I suspected he only half believed.

‘The nurse gave me the envelope to return to you,’ I said, ‘and then I’m afraid I forgot all about it. Your stuff’s been in my car all afternoon.’

‘I went back to the hospital to fetch it,’ he said. ‘And then I was looking for you, sir. Nobody knew where you were.’

Had he remembered that the stripper clip was in his pocket?

‘Sorry about that,’ I said. ‘But something came up. How’s your head, by the way.’

‘Not as bad as yours perhaps,’ he said.

‘Oh, is it that obvious?’

‘Only to a boozer like myself, perhaps.’

I shrugged. ‘Got some bad news, that’s all. But I’m fine now.’ I clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Glad to see you’re fine, too, old fellow. No hard feelings, eh?’

‘No hard feelings, sir.’

*

At the Polish gravesides later that morning there were twenty of us, of whom at least half were French, including de Brinon, two senior army officers, and three reporters who wore berets and smoked pungent French cigarettes and generally looked like characters from Pepe le Moko. De Brinon was a fifty-something figure wearing a fawn raincoat and an officer’s cap that made him look a bit like Hitler and seemed an affectation, given that he was merely a lawyer. Von Gersdorff – who knew about these things – informed me that de Brinon was an aristocrat, a marquis no less, and that he also had a Jewish wife whom the Paris Gestapo had been persuaded to ignore. Which might have explained why he was so keen to look like a Nazi. The French were making a big deal out of coming to Katyn Wood, because it seemed that prior to the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, the French had sent four hundred army officers to help train the Polish army, and many of these – including the two generals now in Katyn – had stayed on as part of the 5th Chasseurs Polonais to fight Marshal Tukhachevsky’s Red Army. All of which meant that Voss, Conrad, Sloventzik, Von Gersdorff and I endured a wasted morning answering endless questions and apologizing for the smell, the rather makeshift wooden crosses on the graves, and the sudden change in the weather. Even Buhtz put in an appearance, having left the international commission in the hands of the Polish Red Cross to conduct their own autopsies exactly as they saw fit. Someone took a picture of us: Voss is pictured explaining Russia’s ‘worst war crime’ to de Brinon, who looks at him uncomfortably, as if fully aware of the fact that he too would be shot by the French for war crimes in April 1947, while the two French generals do what French generals always do best: look smart.

There was no priest: the Poles had already conducted a proper burial service, and no one thought it important to pray again for the dead. Religion was the last thing on anyone’s mind.